While ambitious, the project was not unprecedented. The creation of a
large-scale digital library catering to public access has been attempted
for decades, by a cast of characters worth noting. Aside from Google,
there's the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library based in San
Francisco that sees itself as a bulwark against a modern-day version of
the loss of the Library of Alexandria. Brewster Kahle, who founded the
Internet Archive in 1996 and is now on the DPLA steering committee, aims
to supplement this digital reserve with a physical copy of every book in
existence, collected and stored in a mammoth warehouse in California; he
currently has about 500,000 volumes and hopes to reach 10 million one day.
His efforts are complemented by the HathiTrust ("Hathi" is the Hindi word
for "elephant," an animal that, as the saying goes, never forgets), a
digital preservation repository founded in 2008 that has digitized over 10
million volumes contributed by participating research institutions and
libraries. The 3 billion-plus pages amount to over 8,000 tons (but weigh
close to nothing online, of course). Meanwhile, national institutions like
the Library of Congress have been digitizing their in-house materials for
years. The DPLA is not the first player to step onto the field.

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But that doesn't make it any less of a milestone. Consider these facts:
The Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, added 480,000
books to its collections in the last fiscal year alone, and now boasts
more than 34 million books and other print materials. Add other items like
maps and manuscripts, and the collection towers at 150 million items. And
then there's information stored in digital forms (e-mails, websites, even
President Obama's Twitter feed), which compounds things astronomically.
Speaking in digital terms, the world produced more data in 2009 than in
the entire history of mankind through 2008, according to the former chief
scientist at Amazon.com. In one way, this explosion and the digital
platforms that support it have been a boon for librarians and archivists,
who specialize in collecting information and making it available to users.
But in others, it has been a scourge, rendering the goal of staying
abreast of the world's intellectual output (not to mention the hardware
and software needed to store and display it), more quixotic than ever.
Simply to reap the accessibility benefits that the Internet so
tantalizingly affords, the centuries-worth of items currently extant only
in cloth and paper need to be imaged into bits and bytesa monumental,
manpower-intensive, and prohibitively expensive task. And that is to say
nothing of figuring how to cull and catalog the terabytes of information
that have spent their whole life in digital format. All of which goes to
show that the problem of networking the nation's "living heritage" online
has barely begun to be addressed. The problem is one of time, money, and
most of all, scalemassive scale.

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The DPLA is the most ambitious entrant on the digital library scene
precisely because it claims to recognize this need for scale, and to be
marshaling its resources and preparing its infrastructure accordingly.
With hundreds of librarians, technologists, and academics attending its
meetings (and over a thousand people on its email listserv), the DPLA has
performed the singular feat of convening into one room the best minds in
digital and library sciences. It has endorsement: The Smithsonian
Institution, National Archives, Library of Congress, and Council on
Library and Information Resources are just some of the big names on board.
It has funding: The Sloan Foundation put up hundreds of thousands of
dollars in support. It has pedigree: The decorated historian Darnton has
the pages of major publications at his disposal; Palfrey is widely known
for his scholarship on intellectual property and the Internet; the staging
of the first meeting on Harvard's hallowed campus is not insignificant.